The street protest, the second the city has seen in three days, was called in response to the Oct. 28 death in a Galway hospital of Savita Halappanavar, who was pregnant and reported to the hospital complaining of severe pain. She was reportedly refused an abortion, and died after complications during a miscarriage. Her widower, Praveen, says they was told this was because Ireland was a Catholic country.

The death has sparked outrage across Irelandand the world. One headline in an Indian newspapers online edition accused Ireland of murdering Ms. Halappanavar.

We’ve come a long way since the 60s. Everybody wants to be baby killers these days. It used to be a slur. Now, everybody wants to kill the innocent. It’s a Fluked up world out there with the commies and their retarded followers running it.

On this other FR threadhttp://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/2960561/posts there's a good article by Phil Lawler about the Irish sitution. The bottom line is that neither Irish law nor Catholic morality would have prevented the doctors from doing what was needed to save this woman's life.

Why they didn't catch the septicemia and treat her with an antibiotic on Day One is beyond me. She died of "medical malpractice," not Catholic morality or Irish law.

BTW Ireland has the lowest maternal mortality of any counry in the world. A fact that ought to be more widely appreciated.

Everyone who advocates for abortion needs to step up and off themselves. I mean, seriously. Why is YOUR life any more special than the life of an aborted child? If you’re ‘pro-death’ start from where you are standing and make a difference! P*ssies.

Abortion is NEVER necessary to save the life of the mother. There are a few very rare situations where the baby may end up dying because of medical treatment, but the Church does not consider those to be abortion. For instance, if a woman has cancer and needs radiation or chemotherapy to survive, a secondary effect of that treatment may be to cause a miscarriage. But that is not considered to be an intentional abortion. And some heroic women have freely chosen NOT to have their cancers treated in order to bring the baby alive into the world, giving their lives for the sake of their children. But that is not required by the Church.

Abortion to save the mother’s life is just a weasel-worded liberal lie.

“Abortion is some sort of sacrament to the left. I haven’t figured out its purpose yet.”

Endemic among the left, and sadly much of the secular right, is a corruption of the ideal of freedom that conflates freedom with being free from consequences.

In other words, to many liberals today the issue of “personal freedom” means, to them, being free from the responsibility for their ill-advised actions. To a liberal, how could a woman be “free” if biological reality forces her to make more cautious decisions about sexual activity than men do or face harsher personal consequences than men?

To a liberal, a woman can only be free if society somehow ensures that she never has to pay the price for her misdeeds. Hence, cradle to grave social welfare to pay for the care of the children that she stupidly conceived out of wedlock with losers, as well as state-subsidized contraceptives to allow her to engage in frequent and shallow sexual encounters for no purpose other than brief amusement, as well as state-sanctioned and state-funded infanticide to ensure that she’s not “punished” with a child she doesn’t want.

This is also one of the strong emotional undercurrents influencing the sometimes violent rhetoric around AIDS research. Some liberals believe that if society, that is the government and the taxpayer, do not expend all available resources in the search for a cure that somehow society must be engaged in active subjugation of homosexuals. Likewise, in some areas insurance companies are forbidden by law from charging higher premiums to clients engaged in risky behavior, purely because expecting people to deal with the consequences of their personal decisions must somehow be “unfair”.

To these persons, allowing an individual to reap the benefits or the painful consequences of their life decisions is simply unconscionable. Recognizing first and foremost that there are biological differences between the sexes that result in different personal consequences for promiscuity is antithetical to the radical egalitarian philosophy that claims everyone is completely, utterly, indistinguishably equal in all respects.

How can people be equal, either philosophically or under color of law, if biological differences mean that one sex bears the consequences of promiscuous sexual activity more than the other? To a liberal, if they ever bother to stop to consider natural law, the proper role of government must then be to ensure that government steps up and protects people from the harsh inequities imposed by a cold, harsh reality.

This is also the reason that liberals and homosexual rights activists have gone to great lengths to lobby for laws that prevent insurance companies charging higher premiums for homosexuals. This is far, far too close to holding a person accountable for their own actions for liberal sentiments to tolerate.

To a traditionalist and a conservative freedom necessarily means responsibility. With freedom comes great personal responsibility. Also, when an individual is truly free they are free to succeed, and very importantly they are also free to FAIL. You cannot remove the one from the other, you cannot preserve freedom while at the same time seeking to protect people from the consequences of their behavior.

When you understand that so many liberals, and so very many “libertarians”, in our day and age are really just spoiled, childish libertines that wish to play and cavort without ever having to be subject to the negative consequences of their poor life choices, then you’ll begin to see the same emotional thinking at play in a LOT of nanny-state policies.

Take for example Bloomberg’s soda ban, and the salt and transfats bans. FORCING people to eat or drink in a certain way, to a liberal at least, seems perfectly in line with freedom... because to a liberal freedom means being free from consequences, free from responsibility. If eating poorly results in people getting fat, or suffering from hypertension or arteriosclerosis, then forcing them to eat “right” in order to prevent them suffering is somehow “liberating” those people.

Sad days we live in, brothers and sisters. Sad days indeed. Pretty little lies, and seductive false philosophies are leaving a world full of so much more evil and hardship for future generations to endure.

The Church has agreed that in the case of ectopic pregnancy, the baby has no chance to be born alive in any case. The primary purpose of operating in the case of ectopic pregnancy is to save the mother’s life, and the death of the baby, although regretable, is a side effect, not the central aim of the operation.

That may sound a bit complicated, but I think it makes sense.

It’s basically different from the usual “life or health” of the mother excuses, which basically amount to abortion on demand.

The Church has agreed that in the case of ectopic pregnancy, the baby has no chance to be born alive in any case. The primary purpose of operating in the case of ectopic pregnancy is to save the mothers life, and the death of the baby, although regretable, is a side effect, not the central aim of the operation.

That may sound a bit complicated, but I think it makes sense.

In this case, the woman was having a spontaneous miscarriage at 17 weeks, amniotic fluid was leaking (the leakage of the amniotic fluid over the course of many days, caused the septicemia BTW) and there was zero chance to save the baby. This woman suffered not only the physical pain of a miscarriage gone terribly, terribly wrong that lasted for several days that the doctor assured her and her husband would be quick and over in a few hours, but also the emotional pain of waiting for her baby to die, one that she and her husband really wanted, while her own life slowly slipped away all because the doctor would do nothing because he could still detect a fetal heartbeat.

What you say about ectopic pregnancy makes no sense. In an ectopic pregnancy, while you are correct in saying the baby has no chance to be born alive in any case the termination of the pregnancy by removal of the fetus from the fallopian tube is the surgery, not an unintended side effect, and up until the surgery/termination, the fetus still has a heartbeat.

This woman shouldnt and needed not to have died even under the rules of the Catholic Church. What happened in this case was medical malpractice plain and simple, IMO.

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